Twitter snags over 105 mln users, eyes revenue

BEIJING, April 15 (Xinhuanet) -- Biz Stone and Evan Williams, co-founders of Micro-blogging service Twitter unveiled staggering figures on Wednesday that it has more than 105 million registered users, up more than 1,500 percent from a year ago, and is adding 300,000 users everyday.

In addition to an explosion of users, Twitter is fielding 600 million search queries each day and users are sending out 55 million tweets a day, they said. Tweets are short messages of 140 characters or fewer.

At the company's first conference for Twitter developers on Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer Evan Williams said generating revenue was among the key priorities going forward -- a change of tone for a firm that had previously said it focused mainly on improving the user experience, according to the Reuters reports.

"Money is important," Williams said. "It takes a hell of a lot of money to run Twitter. There has to be a very solid revenue stream underneath this to fuel it."

Biz Stone told Reuters that "At this point we have 175 people and we just yesterday announced our revenue strategy. We're not talking about an IPO."

Micro-blogging service Twitter Tuesday unveiled an advertising program, taking a first step to turn its popularity into profit.

The new advertising service, named "Promoted Tweets," will allow companies to place a less-than-140-character message at the top of pages of search results, wrote Biz Stone in a post on the company's blog.

Twitter said that it is currently testing Promoted Tweets with a number of advertisers including Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks and Virgin America.